What makes this different is that this video makes no use of the Flash player plugin; in other words this video is not a Flash video, which is so common nowadays. For instance, whenever you watch a video on YouTube, you're watching a Flash video with the Browser's Flash player plugin. This video does not make any use of the Flash player--this video is played with native support from the browser (Firefox).
While making this document, and trying to get video to work with HTML5, I learned a number of things:
- The two video formats that HTML5 is supposed to natively support are mpeg4 (also known as mp4) and ogg video (ogv). mp4 videos are commonly used in Quicktime videos and on portable devices such as Ipods. Ogg videos are an open source type of video encoding, and are not commonly used (except on Wikipedia).
- Firefox, which is an open source browser, only supports the open source ogg video format, and will not play mp4 videos. Mp4 codecs apparently require a licensing fee, which Firefox will not pay.
- The browser which best supports both the mp4 and ogv format is apparently Google's Chrome browser.
- There are many types of software which will convert between the common types of video file formats, for instance converting flash video files to mp4 files. However, these softwares will not convert to the Ogg video file format.
- There is a free online video file conversion tool, for converting files to ogv that works with Firefox, called Firefogg. However, I could not get it to work.